Using Visual Studio Code to program CircuitPython with an Adafruit NeoTrellis M4 #Adafruit #NeoTrellis #CircuitPython
My son and I were working on an Adafruit NeoTrellis M4 Mainboard over the holidays. This amazing little device puts a NeoPixel + an Audio board + a USB port along with a 120 MHz Cortex M4 Core and a mic amplifier and you can program it with CircuitPython.
CircuitPython is open source and on Github at https://github.com/adafruit/circuitpython. “CircuitPython is an education friendly open source derivative of MicroPython.” It works with a bunch of boards including this NeoTrellis and it’s just lovely for teaching and learning.
There’s a great Python editor called Mu that works well with CircuitPython. However, my son and I are more familiar with Visual Studio Code so we wanted to see how it worked with CircuitPython.
We installed the Python extension for VS Code as well as the Arduino extension for VS Code and the Arduino IDE directly from the Windows Store….(now) we have a nice Developer Inner Loop going. That inner loop for us (the developers) is that we can write some code, hit save (Ctrl-S) and get immediate feedback. The application restarts when it detects the code.py file has changed and any debug (print) statements appear in the console immediately.
We are really enjoying this Adafruit NeoTrellis M4 Express kit. Next we’re going to make a beat sequencer since the Christmas Soundboard was such a hit with mom!
Read the full story via hanselman.com